Epistemic luck is a generic notion used to describe any of a number of ways in which it can be accidental, coincidental, or fortuitous that a person has a true belief. For example, one can form a true belief as a result of a lucky guess, as when one believes through guesswork that “C” is the right answer to a multiple-choice question and one’s belief just happens to be correct. One can form a true belief via wishful thinking; for example, (...) an optimist’s belief that it will not rain may luckily turn out to be correct, despite forecasts for heavy rain all day. One can reason from false premises to a belief that coincidentally happens to be true. One can accidentally arrive at a true belief through invalid or fallacious reasoning. And one can fortuitously arrive at a true belief from testimony that was intended to mislead but unwittingly reported the truth. In all of these cases, it is just a matter of luck that the person has a true belief. -/- Until the twenty-first century, there was nearly universal agreement among epistemologists that epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge. Call this view “the incompatibility thesis.” In light of the incompatibility thesis, epistemic luck presents epistemologists with three distinct but related challenges. The first is that of providing an accurate analysis of knowledge (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for “S knows that p,” where ‘S’ represents the knower and ‘p’ represents the proposition known). An adequate analysis of knowledge must succeed in specifying conditions that rule out all instances of knowledge-destroying epistemic luck. The second challenge is to resolve the skeptical paradox that the ubiquity of epistemic luck generates: As will become clear in section 2c, epistemic luck is an all-pervasive phenomenon. Coupling this fact with the incompatibility thesis entails that we have no propositional knowledge. The non-skeptical epistemologist must somehow reconcile the strong intuition that epistemic luck is not compatible with knowledge with the equally evident observation that it must be. The third challenge concerns the special skeptical threat that epistemic luck seems to pose for more reflective forms of knowledge, such as knowing that one knows. Each of these challenges will be explored in the present article. (shrink)

The question of church-state separation has haunted America since her founding. James Madison and select founding fathers suggest that religions and states are better off when they minimize (or altogether eliminate) their interactions. Many Muslims in Iran, for instance, believe the opposite – aligning state functions with religious motives results in the most effective state. In this paper, I propose a model of thinking about church-state separation in which states and religions must maintain epistemic vulnerability to allow legal, political, and (...) socio-religious change. Simply put, epistemic vulnerability is an attitude of susceptibility to new sources and instances of knowledge. I present institutions as sets of constraints which interact with shared mental models. In this way, I explain how cultural institutions limit and shape individuals’ susceptibility to new knowledge. The more accommodating a religion is to self-assessment when confronted with new knowledge aids in forming institutions that are reliable, efficient, and robust for groups to grow and adopt new ideas. This results in a model of state-religion that highlights the impact on epistemic vulnerability when either religious organizations or state governance expand their responsibilities outside of their proper functions. (shrink)

RESUMEN D. Pritchard ha sostenido que el conocimiento requiere la satisfacción de una condición de habilidad y una anti-suerte que no guardan relación de implicación entre sí. Se sostiene que la satisfacción de una condición anti-suerte implica cumplir con la condición de habilidad, primero, porque, las características centrales del caso de D. Pritchard en contra de esta implicación son compartidas con casos en los que hay habilidad; y segundo, el caso de A. Goldman del dios benevolente es más efectivo que (...) TEMP, pero involucra un tipo de seguridad diferente a la requerida para el conocimiento. Por último, se muestra que la respuesta de D. Pritchard al problema de la generalidad bloquea la implicación de seguridad a habilidad. Se propone un contraejemplo, adaptando un caso tomado de la epistemología del testimonio. ABSTRACT D. Pritchard holds that knowledge requires the satisfaction of an ability condition and an anti-luck condition that bear no relation of implication to each other. The article argues that the satisfaction of the anti-luck condition implies satisfying the ability condition for two reasons: first, that the main characteristics of Pritchard's case against this implication are shared by cases in which there is ability; and, second, that although A. Goldman's benevolent demon case is more effective than TEMP, it involves a different type of certainty than that required for knowledge. Finally, the article shows that Pritchard's response to the generality problem blocks the implication between certainty and ability, and proposes a counterexample that draws on the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

An increasing number of studies have seen the light over the last few decades concerning the epistemology of the book of Ecclesiastes. The extant research seems to be limited to try to find a suitable philosophical profile for Qohelet’s concept of knowledge whilst ignoring a whole array of topics and theories in contemporary analytic epistemology. The available research thus reveals an ‘inside-out’ approach that is, reading Qohelet and then seeking to link his thought to a particular epistemological stance. In this (...) study, however, an ‘outside-in’ approach is opted for that involves noting all the various issues in epistemology and then comparing each with what, if anything, Qohelet assumed in relation to the specific matter at hand. (shrink)